5 Technologies To Jump Start Your Customer Service

One of the blessings and curses of being a contact center leader is that you become the target of sales people vying for your time so they can sell you on the next big thing to improve your operation. The blessing is the opportunity to learn about some truly interesting technology.

The curses really are twofold. First, you can easily fill your calendar with product demos which isn’t terribly practical for the busy contact center professional. The second is the fact that they all cost money and so it then becomes a determination of which solution(s) will make the biggest difference for your business at the right price.

Now that I’ve sufficiently set this up, I’ve seen a few demos recently with companies that I think are worth taking a deeper look at— all of which have strong potential to increase efficiency, reduce customer effort, and improve the customer experience. Here are five that I recommend getting to know.

If your agents spend any time categorizing or triaging tickets, or searching through volumes of pre-written macros to find just the right response, stop! Wise.io uses natural language processing and deep learning to do this work automatically. You can train the system to tag your tickets and route them to the correct person or group based on the content of the customer’s message. Furthermore, when an agent goes to respond, the system can suggest the most accurate and appropriate macro or canned response to use.

If you’re looking to take your self help to the next level, empowering your customers and agents to quickly find answers to more questions, Nanorep deserves your consideration. You can simply place Nanorep’s search box on your support page or before customers try to initiate an email or chat with customer service. Rather than searching through volumes of knowledge base articles, customers can simply type their questions and Nanorep will use natural language processing to find the answer to that question. Any time the system doesn’t know the answer, the question is saved so that someone can later go in and answer it. This is a great tool for reducing your calls, emails, and chats to customer service.

If you’re looking for the next big support channel to connect with your customer on, SMS (text) deserves your consideration. OneReach offers a great solution for SMS customer service, and much more. They also have the ability to harness the power of IBM Watson and enable chat bots to interact with your customers— which is great if you have a high volume of contacts about certain issues. For example, if customers contact support to be navigated through a purchase or troubleshooting process, bots are great. And bots can seamlessly transfer the interaction to a live agent when they are unable to help.

Have you ever tried to harness the power of your customer community to support your customer service team? I know I have and the traditional forum or message board only got us so far. Think about how many questions customer service receives that can be answered without accessing the customer’s account. Directly allows you to route those questions to a community of customer experts for assistance. This can significantly improve your email response time and help you scale your customer service operation. Furthermore, you can actually compensate your expert users for their time.

The market is saturated with companies that will record all of your telephone calls, promising to provide you with valuable insights about what your customers are saying and the quality of customer service they receive. Gridspace, a deep learning platform, is working to take this to the next level. The system can take your call recordings and your quality requirements and actually automatically rate the quality of each telephone call. Imagine saving your supervisors a ton of time spent listening to calls while also having the ability to automatically monitor and rate 100% of your calls.

As I previously mentioned, the decision to implement even one of these new technologies in your contact center is significant. For many companies, you could make a case for any one of these and the impact it will make to your customer service operation. If you have any questions about them or have another technology we should check out, please leave us a comment and we’ll follow up.

Jeremy Watkin is the Director of Customer Experience at FCR, the premiere provider of outsourced call center and business process solutions. He has more than 17 years of experience as a customer service and experience professional. He is co-founder of the Customer Service Life blog and a regular contributor. Jeremy has been recognized many times for his thought leadership. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn for more awesome customer service and experience insights.